Going Full-Court FDR/New Deal might appeal to the Alienated Midwest.
Oh, gun rights aren’t a “sensitive” issue for democrats in that sense, it’s republicans who consider it an issue of constitutional rights (and to some degree part of the national identity.) Generally it’s a good idea not to spend your political capital fighting what is an existential battle for your opponent and a best-practices concern for you, and the reasons for the dems to drop the gun control debate are painfully obvious: we’re unlikely to make any sudden and drastic changes, and we’re bleeding tons of votes because of it. That said, the compelling reason not to drop the gun safety issue is that over 30,000 American citizens die firearm related deaths in the US annually, whereas most of the rest of the developed world has implemented common-sense laws to give their citizens a statistically significant better chance of not being shot to death. It’s a public health and safety issue, like seat-belts and chemical waste treatment standards.
Sometimes that’s enough.
Note that I’m not suggesting democrats radicalize their language - I’m just suggesting they continue spouting facts and figures, into the ether if need be. We’re not advocating for abolishing gun ownership, nor even for demonizing firearms or the hunters and enthusiasts who use and collect them. Tens of thousands of Americans are dying from an identified cause every year, and I’m just suggesting that to ignore that for political benefit would be the kind of compromise that would dilute our party platform and ethic.
On to your second point, we have one of the of highest rates of gun deaths per capita in the world (11th, I think, but we’re number 1 in suicides,) and only the Seychelles beats us for highest incarceration rate per capita. You’re asserting that there should be some sort of correlation here, but I don’t see how the statistics support that at all (if anything they suggest the opposite of what you propose.) And I know the question was mostly rhetorical, but background checks are good for preventing (among other things) mass shootings. “Active shooters” don’t intend to come out of their sprees alive, so how are harsher sentencing guidelines going to dissuade them? Investment in mental health is one strategy, preventing literally anyone from going to a gun show and coming out with an armory is another one, and there’s nothing that says we can’t do both. Other countries have.
Reading headlines my observation, at this time, is that the Dems have learned nothing and will nominate a moon bat such as Warren and lose again.
Key words are “at this time”. Who knows really. They could lose big in all the Senate seats they have to defend in 2018 and smarten up with a move back to the center.
Do you have a couple example headlines of moon battiness?
To paraphrase from the famous John Belushi movie:
“We welcome both kinds of candidates here in mainstream America: right-wing and bat-shit right-wing.”
How do you do that without raising their taxes?
You don’t raise their taxes, you give the middle and working classes tax relief. Instead you raise taxes on the people who actually benefit from our economic system to the point where they can afford to pay lobbyists billions of dollars to shift their own tax burden to the working poor (wealth redistribution is not exclusive to the left.) That’s where the money is.
Don’t know how much you trust Gallup, but the idea of raising taxes on the very wealthy and corporations is actually pretty popular. Taxes | Gallup Historical Trends
That’s not New Deal, that’s just punishing the rich. And if you cut middle class taxes and raise taxes on the right, you defund the government, which means social programs have to be cut. Keeping the middle class Bush tax cuts reduces revenue by $3.4 trillion over ten years.
Ha ha. Good. 
How about thinking you belong to an Indian tribe since you have high cheekbones ?
But I digress on the subject of this thread. The point I was making is the Dems will lack on major success till they move back to the center, however I see no evidence they understand this yet.
So that’s a no, you don’t have any actual examples of moonbattiness. And for the Democrats to move toward the center they’d have to move to the left.
Meanwhile, Jerry Brown’s made pretty good progress toward untangling the mess that was California’s political gridlock. Moonbeams and moonbats may have something to recommend them.
8 months ago people were saying the same thing about Republicans.
I am a hard left liberal. I liked and supported Bernie. The thing Democrats need right now is someone the Republicans don’t know that will fire up the same base Bernie fired up. The left lost a lot of what should be their traditional constituency (lower middle class workers) because of the gun issue. No Democrat cares as much about gun control as most conservatives care about fighting it. It’s time to put that fight to the side. If they do that and nominate someone without a ton of baggage who can fire up the left while also loudly defending 2nd amendment rights they can head off 75% of objections to their candidacy. Run on a platform of, “we don’t want your guns, we don’t want you to starve, stop working to feed the 1% while you get nothing, Make America Respected Again.”
But, that’s all assuming that we are not at war by 2020. I don’t see us not getting into an armed conflict before then and when we do all of this goes out the window.
The Bernie base can’t win elections. You want a candidate the Bernie base likes a lot, but the people that actually need to be fired up are African-American voters. In key states, they are the difference between victory and defeat. Democrats need 90% of that vote and for their turnout to match whites. Otherwise, it’s hard to see a path to victory in a general election.
The good news is that it’s easier to find a candidate blacks and moderate voters like than it is to find a candidate Sanders voters and moderates both like.
No, the people you need to be fired up are whites. If the black vote was the answer, how did Clinton get 88% of the black vote and lose?
Because a) Democrats need 90% or above, and b) they need black turnout to be high. It was not in 2016.
Now there is a strategy Democrats can use to fire up more white voters, it’s called actual Clintonism, but the Democratic Party has moved far away from where they were in the 1990s. Martin O’Malley actually having to distance himself from his crime record and Hillary having to distance herself from most of her husband’s record demonstrated how far the Democrats have moved away from targeting middle class whites.
In a way Trump did pull back the Repubs to the center. Many on the far right do not like him. The issue is how you define the center. If you so far to the left, or right, to that you can’t see straight you will never see where the center actually is.
Yeah, that’s a great analogy! Just like Ron Paul got 40% of votes in his party’s primary while winning a bunch of states…oh, wait, no, I guess that’s total bullshit.
Democrats should first figure out what they stand for besides serving corporate interests and mouthing empty platitudes.
Sorry, that’s Republicans’ MO, not Democrats’.
There is clearly no choice but Warren.